Your garage floor spends five months soaking in road salt.

A full flake system runs $9 to $14 per square foot, so a typical two-car bay of 400 to 600 square feet is $4,000 to $7,500. The range is driven almost entirely by the state of the slab underneath: a clean new-build floor sits at the bottom, and a salt-spalled slab needing an overlay first sits above the top. Anyone quoting a firm price over the phone without knowing whether your slab holds moisture is quoting the coating, not the job.

With polyaspartic, yes. Standard epoxy needs a slab at roughly 10°C and rising, and an unheated Collingwood garage is below that from about mid-October to early May — the slab is a large thermal mass on frozen ground, so it lags the air temperature badly. Polyaspartic cures far colder and far faster, which is the main reason it is our default recommendation in this region rather than a premium upsell.

For an unheated garage on the Georgian Bay snowbelt, polyaspartic: it installs in cold weather, returns to service in a day rather than a week, tolerates freeze-thaw movement, and will not yellow where daylight hits it. For a heated shop with a stable slab and no direct sun, epoxy is the better value and builds a thicker film in one pass. We install both and the recommendation follows the building.

Because concrete poured without an intact vapour barrier wicks groundwater and pushes it out as vapour, continuously. A sealed coating traps that at the bond line and it lifts the floor off in sheets, often after looking perfect for a year. It is a live issue here — sand and a high table at Wasaga Beach, shoreline property, and pre-1980 slabs generally. We test with calcium chloride or an in-slab RH probe before quoting, because a slab over the threshold needs a mitigating primer and that is a real cost, not a surprise.

Foot traffic the same evening and vehicles in 24 to 48 hours on a polyaspartic system. Epoxy is 24 hours to walk on and five to seven days before you park. For a commercial floor that difference is usually what decides the product, because a week closed costs more than the coating.

Hot tire pickup — where a warm tire lifts the coating off the concrete — is a failure of bond, not of product. It happens to peel-and-stick tiles and to thin roll-on kits applied over an acid-etched or unprepared floor. A slab that has been diamond ground to a proper profile and coated with a bonded system does not do it. This is the single clearest reason preparation is most of what you are paying for.

Not for at least 28 days, and a cold-weather pour may want longer. Fresh concrete releases water for weeks and coating over it traps that vapour under the film. We will not do it inside 28 days regardless of the deadline — it is the one thing we are inflexible about, because the failure is total and redoing it is on us.

Ours is 15 years on workmanship, in writing, naming the system installed and the moisture reading it was issued against. Ask that of anyone quoting you — a warranty with no slab test behind it is a warranty against the one failure mode that actually happens.